Here we go again: in the annual GRTU survey on enterprises, retailers expressed concern about online competitors and lack of parking.
The lament has become a predictable outcome of the GRTU survey, one of several that analyses trends in the retail market with consistent results.
What is worrying is that while the loss of some market to online purchases is inevitable, some local retailers are clearly burying their heads in the sand.
The shopping experience has changed as a result of significant changes in society, from the increase in women working to the prevalence of internet – not to mention internet shopping (including in the wider sense of buying online and having the goods shipped here).
People are more aware of their consumer choices, more demanding of value for money, and much more protective of their free time.
Consumer choice is to a great extent no longer an issue. EU membership has opened our borders and given us access to brands we only dreamed of. But the size of the local market is what it is and retailers cannot be expected to stock the full range of each product. Consumers find this frustrating and that spills over into negative – if unfair – perceptions of retailers.
The issue of price is another oft-repeated complaint that defies any attempt to justify. The consumer simply does not want to hear about transport costs or overheads spread across a smaller client base, no matter whether the product is a medicine, a book or a garment.
And finally the issue of free time. The concept of shopping for pleasure has been irreversibly tarnished by time pressures weighing down on us all. If you have less time to shop for something, you have even less time to shop around and the quicker and less painless the experience, the better. Hence the advantages offered by malls rather than high street shops (apart from the opportunistic sales potential).
So what are the solutions? The food sector faced all these issues and took some painful decisions. It realised that as more women started to work (and drive), the less time they would have to visit butchers, bakers and greengrocers and thus the advantage that a supermarket had over individual outlets.
The supermarket gave way to chains, leveraging economies of scale to bring in more international brands, while larger outlets offered more shelf space and catered for more clients to spread the overheads. And they acknowledged that parking is an issue, so they started looking for locations where families could stop, buy groceries for a week at a time, and load them into the boot of the car.
It is utterly pointless to lament the loss of personal service we enjoyed from village grocers and the changing values of family life. Other retail sectors need to adapt or die.
What are they up against? More than half of Malta’s population made at least one online purchase last year – 83 per cent of those between 16 and 24 years and 79 per cent among the 25-34 year cohort. The Business Observer calculated in June 2014 that €40 million a year was being spent online.
And yet, local retailers seem to have given up and 1.4 per cent fewer enterprises were selling online last year when compared to 2014, according to the National Statistics Office.
Retailers need to attract shoppers, offer them choice at a better price, and make it easier for them to do so, whether this means moving to a better location, merging or making deliveries. The writing is on the wall: customers will not go out of their way out of misplaced sentimentality.